


Twenty Years Later

by inhisownwords (salsownwords)



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, I added the Peter/Juno pairing but this isn't really a ship fic jsyk, M/M, also Buddy giving some tough love, and Nureyev just being a sweetheart, just Juno Steel being real sad, you can thank the TPP discord server for this one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-21
Updated: 2020-05-21
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:47:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24309961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salsownwords/pseuds/inhisownwords
Summary: It felt wrong--entirely wrong--how time could march forward like this. How Mars was able to carry on without Benzaiten Steel living on it.
Relationships: Peter Nureyev/Juno Steel
Comments: 7
Kudos: 89





	Twenty Years Later

How the hell had it already been twenty years?

It felt wrong--entirely wrong--how time could march forward like this. How Mars was able to carry on without Benzaiten Steel living on it.

Then again, Juno wasn’t any better. He hadn’t stopped moving in the past two decades, either. It felt like he’d already lived through more than a lifetime’s worth of hurt, of joy and excitement and disappointment. He’d loved and lost more than any person should, certainly more than any person ever expects to.

So who was he to criticize the rest of the world for continuing to spin right along with him?

Juno Steel had soldiered through enough anniversaries to have a routine down in order to help him cope--or, rather, ignore it entirely. The only problem was, he wasn’t on Mars anymore, so that routine hardly mattered now. Which meant Juno woke that morning, on the twentieth anniversary of his brother’s murder, with enough weight on his heart to keep him cemented in bed. The last place he wanted to be.

Trouble was, he didn’t know where he’d prefer to be. No matter where he went, Ben wouldn’t be there. Hell, he wouldn’t even find him on Mars anymore, except buried beneath copper dirt six feet beyond his reach. In a grave not meant for him.

His bed would do for now.

Juno rolled onto his back, draping an arm over his eyes and wrapping the other around his torso. Behind his eyelids, he could see Benten’s smile, the one he always thought they shared but other people seemed to favor more. Seemed like a common theme with them, the more he thought about it. Benten attracted people to him the way Juno pushed them away--without even trying. It was hard not to compare yourself to someone when that’s all anyone else would do. They were mirrored reflections of one another, but one bore a crack straight through the center of its face. Imperfect, jarring, unsettling.

A marking, a constant reminder that Juno was the lesser of the two. Not that he needed the help remembering that.

It disgusted Juno, the fact that he was the one who continued to draw breath and Ben wasn’t. More than that, it was twisted, how fate punished his brother for his kindness. While Juno’s heart drew its shutters and locked its doors, Benzaiten’s blossomed open. So wide that he eventually bled out.

The day Juno lost Benten, his smile died with him. Ben was always better at that, anyway.

Raking his fingers through his hair, Juno finally sat up. His spine ached and popped in protest. With a sigh, he reached for his comms to check the time, his face falling when he realized it was late in the afternoon. Half the day gone. He was hoping for more than that. Still, he knew he couldn’t go the entire day without at least getting some water in him. Any longer and Rita would come barging in to take matters into her own hands, and he didn’t have the energy to subdue her even on a good day. So he reluctantly slid on some sweatpants and a t-shirt and shuffled to the kitchen, hoping he’d find it empty.

Of course, no such luck. Buddy sat at the table, a mug in one hand and her comms in the other as she idly scrolled through whatever was on the screen. She glanced up at him, ruining any chance Juno had at slinking back into the hall unnoticed. “Ah, there you are. I was wondering when you’d emerge,” she greeted, raising a brow at him. “Any longer and I may have considered being worried.”

Juno huffed in response, rolling his eye but saying nothing as he beelined for the coffee maker.

He caught her frowning from the corner of his eye. “Sullen silence isn’t a good look on you, detective,” she remarked. Her words were sharp but her tone was laced with concern, an unspoken question in the way she leaned forward to rest her arms on her crossed legs:  _ What’s wrong? _

There wasn’t any point in lying to Buddy Aurinko, not when she’d pin you down with that stare that said she’d accept nothing less than the truth, and she’d  _ know _ if you withheld it from her. With a defeated sigh, Juno took his mug of coffee and leaned back against the counter, bringing it to his lips to take a sip. Anything to buy him some time before the captain inevitably grilled him. He now regretted not just drinking some water from the bathroom sink before anyone could interrogate him like this. “Just a rough night,” he mumbled, a last-ditch effort to get out of this.

Buddy’s lip quirked into a knowing half-smile. “Really? I would have thought you’d actually gotten some sleep, with Ransom still out on his assignment.”

Juno choked on his coffee and coughed in a vain attempt to cover it up. “I--we--I don’t know what you--” he stammered, his neck suddenly unbearably hot.

“Oh, I hardly care, Juno,” Buddy teased, waving a hand at him. “What a grown lady does on his own time is none of my business, so long as it doesn’t interfere with  _ my _ business.”

“Does that mean I can go back to sulking now?” he shot at her.

“No,” she replied, deadpan. “You have a job coming up soon. I can’t have you compromised--I need you alert and focused and ready for anything.”

Juno groaned and took another sip, letting his head fall back in exasperation. “I’ll be  _ fine _ , Buddy, I’m just--” He sighed curtly. “Today’s just a bad day for me, alright? I’ll be over it by tomorrow.”

Bold of him to say considering he still wasn’t over it after twenty years.

Buddy’s expression softened by a fraction. “Why today in particular?”

Juno’s lungs suddenly felt smaller. His head hung low now, staring pointedly at his coffee. “It’s…” He took in as deep a breath as he could, resigning himself to having this talk. “I...lost someone. On this day, a long time ago.” He took another gulp of coffee, more to have something to do so he didn’t have to look her way.

There was a moment of quiet before Buddy nodded her head, a look of understanding spreading across her face. “I see. Who was it? A friend? Lover?” she asked, not unkindly--like she genuinely wanted to know.

“Family,” Juno replied. His voice sounded robotic, monotone and flat. “My twin brother.”

Buddy’s eyebrow rose in surprise. “Your twin,” she repeated softly. The corners of her mouth turned downward. “I’m sorry, Juno. I...I cannot imagine.”

“It’s fine.” The words left Juno’s mouth before he could stop them. A reflex, a deflection--nothing to see here, nothing to worry about, just carry on as usual.

Mercifully, Buddy didn’t call him on the lie. Instead, she motioned to the open chair across from her at the table, a silent invitation for him to join her. “How long ago?”

Juno hesitated a moment before joining her, leaning back in the chair in a fake show of nonchalance. “Twenty years, now,” he muttered into his coffee mug. Sipping from it was a good way to keep from making eye contact with her, something he was wholly incapable of at the moment. Too scared of what he’d find in her eyes, and even more scared of what  _ she’d _ find in his.

“Quite a long time,” Buddy commented, glancing away from him to gaze at something in the distance--maybe something that wasn’t there at all. At least, not in the present. “I know all too well that the sting never truly fades completely. It becomes more manageable, yes, but no less present.”

He knew without asking that she was referring to Vespa; he could tell by the way she winced on that last word and the way she glanced around the room, subconsciously searching for Vespa’s presence, finding her in dirty dishes in the sink and boots by the door. Small reassurances that she was still there. Juno had searched for Ben, too, for months after he’d died. The familiarity of it all made his heart clench in his chest. He went to sip down some coffee to distract himself but the mug was empty--he set it on the table with a sigh. “How--” he began, uncertain and uneasy, “how did you manage it?”

She quirked a brow at him. “Manage it?” she parroted.

“Yeah,” he said, drawing out the word as he considered how to explain himself. “Like, how can you...I don’t know, just,  _ live _ with yourself? Live without  _ them? _ ”

“I didn’t,” Buddy laughed, a wry smile on her lips. “Not for a while, anyway.” She leaned back as well, running a hand through her hair as she continued on: “I didn’t have time to mourn. Or, rather, I didn’t believe I did. I certainly refused to believe I deserved to mourn, or to even be alive at all. The wrong life had been lost that day, I thought.”

Juno flinched. He tried to cover it up by scratching the scar on his nose.

“But then, who decides who is more worthy of living?” Buddy posed, now fixing her stare directly on Juno. “How does one even measure the value of a life? I spent years trying to riddle that out and found the only answers I could come up with were entirely too self-loathing. Nothing held any water. And after a while, after the search for those answers nearly killed me, I figured,” she went on as she leaned forward again, arms resting on the table before her, “if the powers that be decided on that day that I was the one to survive, I’d better at least make good use of the time I’d been gifted. Whether I felt I deserved it or not.”

Buddy was a lot of things; subtle was not among that list. Juno dodged her gaze, chewing on his lower lip and clearing his throat. “You lucked out,” he said quietly, his hand curling into a fist. “You didn’t lose her forever.” He couldn’t keep the bitterness from bleeding into his tone.

Pausing for a second, Buddy set her lips into a thin line. “No,” she said finally, “I didn’t.” Her expression smoothed over again. “But fifteen years was long enough to give me a taste of it.”

Juno sighed, his head sinking down into his shoulders. “I know.”

She folded her hands on the table, never taking her stare off him. “Juno,” she said, “perhaps it will help you to hear what someone once told me.”

Despite himself, his eye flitted up to meet hers.

Her one visible eye pinned him in place. “It’s not an insult to the dead that you continue your life without them,” she said firmly. “Or else you might as well have died with them.”

He curled his lip and bit back a scoff, his gaze settling back on the table. Easy to say for someone who got to have a do-over. Buddy couldn’t understand what this sort of loss felt like, not really--not the permanent kind that you couldn’t smudge out no matter how hard you tried to scrub it away.

Then Juno glanced up again. The rotten, irradiated skin around her prosthetic eye peeked from behind her crimson curls. She, like him, saw the world only halfway, around one eye that perpetually stared into the past. Though she had Vespa back, Buddy would live with the scars of having lost her for the rest of her life. She couldn’t scrub those scars away.

And Juno thought, maybe, she  _ did _ understand. Maybe she even had a point.

The two stared at one another for another heartbeat, a flurry of unspoken words carried in their gazes, until Buddy’s mouth curved up into a smile. Breaking the spell, she stood and grabbed her coffee mug. “You should also know:” she said as she brought the cup to the sink, throwing a smirk over her shoulder, “Ransom returned about half an hour ago.”

Juno jumped at the sound of Peter’s name, his eyes widening a fraction. “He did?” He tried not to sound too excited.

“Yes.” She raised an eyebrow at him. “He asked after you. I let him know that you were still sleeping and suggested he unwind for a while before seeing you. You may want to give him a visit.” Without another word, she fired a grin at him before walking out of the room, leaving him a little unsteady.

Juno’s heart rose into his throat. He hadn’t expected Nureyev to return today. Or maybe he’d forgotten? Either way, he felt wholly unprepared for this. Over the months since their reunion, the two of them had fallen right back into one another head-first, risks and baggage and hang-ups be damned. It was like nothing Juno had experienced before, but then, most things with Peter Nureyev were.

He was happy. Truly. And that’s why he hesitated to broach the topic of Benten with Peter. It felt too much to put on him; if Juno couldn’t bear the weight of it, how could he expect Nureyev to do it? This new bond they were cultivating, it still felt too fragile to risk crushing with something like this.

But he wanted to try. God, did he want to try. Because at one point, and in some way still, Benzaiten was everything to him. And if Nureyev wanted a spot like that in Juno’s heart for himself, he should know who he’d be rooming with.

Before his courage could leave him, Juno left the kitchen and marched towards Nureyev’s room, raising a knuckle to the door and softly knocking. “Ransom?” he called. “Buddy told me you just got back.”

“Come in, Juno,” Peter invited. Juno slid the door open to find Nureyev sitting on his bed, his comms in one hand. He’d already donned more comfortable clothes, his damp hair a giveaway that he’d just run through a shower. A warm smile spread across his lips as Juno stepped into the room, the door shutting behind him. “I was just about to come see you myself, seems you’ve beat me to the punch.”

The scent of Nureyev’s cologne welcomed Juno, immediately smoothing out the sharpness of his nerves. “I’ve been known to swing first from time to time,” he said with half a laugh. He came to sit beside Nureyev on his bed. Right away, Peter opened his arms to wrap them around Juno, pulling him close against his chest. Juno sank into him, holding him tightly, soaking in his smell, savoring his warmth. Something about today made him feel the need to memorize what this felt like. Just in case. “I missed you,” he said, more honestly than he’d meant.

That seemed to surprise Peter. He pulled back, still smiling but now quirking a brow. Rather than question him, he surprised Juno right back by cupping the side of his face gingerly and leaning forward to kiss him. Juno hummed and returned the kiss in earnest. A flicker of heat kindled in his heart, burning away the gloom ever so slightly. All too soon, Nureyev pulled away, resting his forehead against Juno’s. “I missed you too, dear,” he muttered. There was a touch of worry in his eyes. “Buddy mentioned you’d been sleeping most of the day. Are you feeling alright?”

All of a sudden, Juno’s throat felt tight. He tried to swallow the feeling down, to no avail. The concern and unfiltered love in Nureyev’s gaze was forcing a crack in the dam that kept everything held back and under control. He didn’t know how much strength it would take to keep himself in check once he started this, or if he even had it in him. For once, Juno decided to risk it anyway. “No,” he whispered. His voice was soft and watery. He couldn’t help but laugh at it. “Not today, I’m not.”

Nureyev leaned back enough to scan Juno’s face for clues, his brow furrowed. “Did something happen?” he asked.

Again, the raw worry in Nureyev’s voice splintered the dam further. Juno’s eye stung, but he blinked it back. “Not exactly,” he started, clearing his throat in an attempt to steady his voice. “I mean, something happened but it was...it was a really long time ago now. Twenty years ago, today.”

Peter pressed his lips together and tilted his head to the side. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked. There wasn’t a trace of hesitation, no inkling that he’d rather Juno kept it to himself. He lifted a hand to hold Juno’s jaw, his thumb stroking his cheek.

Juno inhaled sharply through his nose. “Yeah,” he said, some life returning to his voice. “If, uh, if that’s alright with you. I know you just got back--”

“I’m more than happy to listen, Juno,” Nureyev cut him off, a tiny grin pulling at the corner of his lips. “I can’t think of a single thing I’d like more.”

Juno chuckled, leaning in to press a kiss to that smile, then another. Then one more for good measure. When he pulled back, he took a second to take in Peter’s face--his reddening lips, his flushed cheeks, his impossibly bright eyes. Eyes that pierced through any darkness and only focused on hope. A person who had seen what Nureyev had shouldn’t have eyes like that, and yet here he sat, the only light Juno could see in a murky fog of grief.

Benten would have loved him. Juno knew that for certain. And now, more than anything, he wanted these two men--the two most important people in his whole world--to finally meet. Taking a steadying breath, Juno cracked a smile of his own. “I never did tell you who taught me how to dance.”


End file.
